The Folding Knife (21 page)

"Yes, but--"

"You're an expert. More to the point, you've got the men and the organisation to carry out mass evacuations very quickly indeed. Stop arguing, general, who the hell else is there? The fire brigade?"

"Fine," Aelius said, with a shrug. "Right, I need to know when, and where to."

They crowded round the desk, and between them, somehow or other, they drew a new map, heavily annotated with times and directions; big arrows drawn in Basso's imperial purple ink (for signing statutes and decrees) and clusters of numbers in his nearly illegible handwriting, and underneath, other numbers (the designations of army units) in Aelius' tiny, neat, slanting hand. Then Basso looked at his clock and said, "That'll have to do. You'd better get started or you'll miss your chance." Aelius grabbed the map, nodded, and left. After he'd gone, there was dead silence for some time.

"Well," Basso said, "I sincerely hope we've got that right. Otherwise..." He shrugged. "If anybody's got an alternative theory that fits all the facts, this would probably be a good time."

Sentio, who'd been looking very unhappy, said, "You do realise we're risking the lives of everybody in this city on the word of an oysterman."

Basso looked at Mavorsus. "Well?"

"As far as I know, that's about right," he said. "Don't you all go blaming me if it turns out wrong."

"And there you have it," Basso said, throwing his head back and gripping the arms of his chair. "If everybody dies, don't blame us. Hell of an epitaph for a quarter of a million people."

"Who'd have died anyway," Cinio said quietly, "if we'd just sat here and done nothing."

"Stick some more of the leaves from that bag on the fire, someone." Basso grinned. "My mother may have gone a bit strange in her old age, but she knows her home remedies. She bought that stuff from a Verrhoean who swore blind it wards off the plague. Wouldn't give her the recipe, unfortunately, or else we'd all be laughing."

The cat-faced doctor pulled a face, then got up and went to the brazier. "They haven't had the plague in Verrhoe for seventy years," he said.

"There you are, then," Basso said. He twisted his neck restlessly, as though the plague was an itch he couldn't quite reach to scratch. "This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I've ever done," he said. "Sentio, get this man here a large sum of money and send him home. We've taken advantage of his sense of civic duty for long enough."

Sentio stood up. "When you say large..."

Basso laughed. "As much as he can carry. Fill a fucking sack. If we're right, he's just saved the Republic. If he's wrong, in a couple of days it won't matter a damn. You, what's-your-name: stay at your brother-in-law's till you hear from me, and try not to die, we may need you again."

That left him with Cinio and the two doctors. "Is there anything else we can help you with?" the bald doctor asked.

Basso shook his head. "You two stay here, though," he said. "Who knows, someone might get sick. Cinio, remind me, what's the legal position about people who die without making a will?"

Basso stayed in his office for eight days. He slept on the floor, and when he wasn't working he sat and stared at the mosaics. One of his earliest memories had been sneaking into this room, which was out of bounds by order of his father, and climbing up the mountain of stored and dust-sheeted furniture to get a closer look at the pretty pictures on the sloping ceiling. In particular he remembered one angel with a sad face; her eyes were big and wide open, and a single stylised tear hung from her lower eyelid. She didn't seem to be there any more.

They brought him reports, every hour on the hour. The evacuations had gone as smoothly as could be expected. Plague had broken out in two of the evacuation camps, but both the infection rate and the mortality were only a fraction of what they'd become used to. People who'd had the plague and recovered were immune; he conscripted them into burial and security details. Looting was a problem. Aelius' soldiers wouldn't go near areas known to have been infected when the wind was in that direction, and who could blame them for that? But gangs of recovered plague-sufferers were taking the opportunity to help themselves to whatever they could carry. By the fifth day, Aelius had enough men who'd caught the plague and lived to form a specialist squad, who hunted the looters through the deserted streets. For a while, the looters managed to get their plunder past the checkpoints by hiding it on the floor of the handcarts used for clearing the dead and piling bodies on top, until Aelius got wise to that. There were outbreaks of dysentery and other illnesses brought on by overcrowding and exposure in the evacuation camps. With no ships coming in, food was already a problem, and could only get worse. The death toll rose. Accurate figures were hard to come by, needless to say, but the best guesses put it at an average of eleven hundred a day. Firewood, for burning bodies, ran out on the sixth day, and Basso chaired a grim meeting to consider alternatives; burying them would take up manpower urgently needed for other purposes, dumping them at sea would mean lifting the blockade and risking having ships make a run for it. The latter option prevailed; nearly all the sailors who'd been trapped in the harbour district when the plague had first broken out were dead by now, so the risk of unauthorised egress was minimal.

On the ninth day, the estimated total went over ten thousand.

"You know," Basso said, when they broke the news to him, "I simply can't imagine that. Ten thousand people dead. That's enough to fill the Blues' end of the Track, isn't it?"

About that, they said.

Later he regretted thinking about it in those terms. He could see it clearly in his mind's eye: the Track, on a race day, and one end of the auditorium filled with dead people. Well, he told himself, more people than that died in Perigouna, which was entirely my fault, and this isn't. But that didn't work at all, so he sat up all night checking the stores inventories against the supply requisitions; a useful exercise that revealed five clear cases of theft of food. He wrote an order for the thefts to be thoroughly investigated, and the perpetrators hanged, as an example.

On the tenth day, he called a meeting of the full emergency cabinet. The picture, they told him, was inconclusive. Deaths in the evacuation camps were considerably lower than in the infected areas of the City, which had been sealed off. Incidence of new cases, however, had peaked on the seventh day and was now holding more or less steady. The airborne theory, it had to be said, was starting to look a bit ragged; if the theory was correct, there should either be a lot fewer or a lot more cases, depending on the distance the infection could carry. A steady plateau in the statistics suggested that it was being spread by something else, and the evacuations had therefore made no material difference, one way or another.

On the fifteenth day, when the figure topped eighteen thousand, the cat-faced doctor presented an alternative hypothesis. It wasn't airborne at all, he said; it was in the water, just like the contamination at Perigouna. As evidence, he produced maps of the underground cisterns, with the routes of the sewers overlaid in red. The fluctuations Basso had noticed weren't in fact anything to do with the wind, though it had been a reasonable enough mistake; they were in fact linked to the tides. If (the doctor argued) an unusually high level of silt had drifted into the outlets where the City sewers flowed out into the bay, it could alter the course of the currents. Foul water could, under a complex concatenation of circumstances, be flowing out into the sea and immediately be drawn in again by the backdraft; in which case, it would end up in the overflows, which travelled along three-hundred-year-old lead pipes which had been neglected for a long time. It was entirely possible that those pipes were leaking; in which case, contamination could easily enter the cisterns, from which the City drew all its clean water. The fluctuations they'd been observing were consistent with this theory: accelerated incidence of infection when the tide turned (which coincided with some, though not all, of the predictable changes in wind direction), and irregularities in both incidence and mortality that could be explained quite simply by the extent to which the contaminated water was diluted--in other words, whether the cistern tanks in question were empty or full at the time. The evacuation camps, he pointed out, drew water from the cisterns, but by the time it reached the outskirts and the suburbs, a lot of the flow would have been diverted to other places, while additional clean water would have entered the system from the outer rainwater traps and underground springs; accordingly, the contamination in the water that reached the camps was consistently more diluted than it would be further inside the City, hence fewer cases and a lower fatality ratio.

When he'd finished, Basso said, "But what about the blisters, and the swellings on the face and wrists, and the lumps under the arms? That's plague, not poisoned water, surely."

"It's plague, but it travels in water," the doctor said. "Obviously a new variety we haven't come across before."

So they tried again. Aelius rounded up as many immune citizens as his press gangs could catch, and they dug channels to draw off water from the river upstream of the City into the cisterns. It took five days, during which both incidence and mortality declined steadily and substantially. By the time the sluices were opened and the grand dilution programme was finally under way, the death rate was down to twenty or so a day. It went up again almost immediately, but the cause was an outbreak of typhoid, caused by the unfiltered river water, rather than plague.

Among the very last recorded cases of the plague were six novices at the Studium, all of whom died, and two members of the First Citizen's own household. Because of the quarantine regulations, it was impossible to find out the names of the dead novices until the movement restrictions were lifted. For the same reason, Basso had to wait until Aelius (in charge of coordinating the emergency while he was himself quarantined) told him he was allowed to write to his sister to tell her that their mother had died. He didn't bother telling her that he'd had the plague as well. It was self-evident that he'd recovered, and she wouldn't have been interested in anything solely to do with him.

One of the first letters he received once the blockade was lifted came in a jar of dates. It read:

Thought you'd like to know I'm not dead
;
assume you're not either, but would appreciate confirmation. Heard about the artificial flood and rationale behind same; occurs to me that if plague came from backed-up sewers, as currently favoured hypothesis seems to suggest, it can't have come from ship with all crew dead off the Cape; if so, what did they all die of, and surely a bit of a coincidence. Just thought I'd mention that. Cordially, Bassano.

That made him wince. Not the water-borne theory, then; in which case, diverting the river and flooding the City had been a complete waste of time. But enough doubt had been cast on his airborne theory to convince him that that had been wrong, too; in which case, everything he'd done had been pointless, and the City had survived in spite of his actions rather than because of them. Not that it mattered a damn, but...

If Bassano had figured it out, nobody else had. He waited for someone to mention it, but nobody said anything. Eventually, when he told Sentio, the look of total bewilderment and despair on his Chancellor's face told him that he hadn't just been keeping quiet out of respect for the First Citizen's feelings--

"We did all that," Sentio whispered, "and it wasn't..."

"Apparently not, no."

"Oh my God," Sentio said, his eyes wide open. "What if someone finds out?"

Who, though? One rather wonderful side effect of the plague was that all his most intelligent enemies were dead. Cremutius and Saturninus had died on the first day. Moriscus, Bonosus, Faustinus and Laesianus, the Pupienus brothers; his loathsome cousin Balbinus, a thorn in his side since they were boys, with the added bonus that his wife, uncle and sons died with him, which meant Basso was his next of kin and inherited his very substantial estate, including nine hundred shares in the Shining Star Bank, which left it wide open to a hostile takeover. Olybrias had caught the plague but had recovered, though he'd lost the sight of one eye and most of his hearing, which was bound to curtail his trouble-making potential in both business and politics. The second tier of benefit was that their successors in the Optimate hierarchy were men like Pescennius, Macrianus and Numa, clowns, idiots; idiots who didn't realise they were idiots, by definition the very best sort. Until someone new managed to hack and slither his way up the ladder past these fools, the political opposition was effectively dead. Losses on his own side, by contrast, were almost indecently light, and most of them were men he'd have no trouble doing without: Leontius, who'd challenged him for the nomination; Praeclarus, who couldn't open his mouth without embarrassing the government; Gracilianus, who'd actually voted against him over the Auxentine war. If someone had given him thirty political assassinations of his choice for a birthday present, he couldn't have done better.

He wrote to Antigonus (who'd had it but survived; shrugged it off, they told him, like it was just a cold or something--not bad for a dying man). He wrote:

Buy land
.

Not unreasonably, Antigonus wrote back:

What land?

Basso replied:

All of it
.

Which Antigonus proceeded to do. First they drew down on cousin Balbinus' personal fortune. Then they took over the Shining Star and used its entire cash reserve. Then they had to start using their own money, but it didn't matter. With so many deaths, land prices were lower than anybody could remember, at least until word started to spread about the Bank's furious buying spree. A matter of weeks after the end of the plague, land prices were back where they'd been before the outbreak, and the First Citizen was commended by the House for his swift and effective intervention, which had saved the City from potential economic ruin. A certain amount of selling (at the restored prices) restored the Bank's liquidity, leaving Basso with--